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Friday, July 26, 2013

Events in Cairo have all
the hallmarks of a return to the repression under ousted President Hosni
Mubarak that prompted millions of Egyptians two years ago to camp out on
Cairo’s Tahrir Square for 18 days until the military forced him to step down
after 30 years in office. Little in the unfolding drama in Egypt genuinely
responds to the demands put forward by the protesters two years ago: an end to
the police state, greater political freedom, respect for human rights, an end
to corruption, and justice and dignity. Is Egypt going to change? Or is this a
return to Mubarak-style politics?

Same-Same or
Same-Different?

Egypt was seemingly united
two years ago when Mubarak was ousted. There were no mass demonstrations
against the ousting of the president. This time round, the Muslim Brotherhood’s
mass protests against the removal of President Mohammed Morsi, post-revolt Egypt’s
first democratically elected leader, complicates things for the military that
sees itself as the guarantor of the state. The military has in recent days
demonstrated that it has learnt lessons from its bungling of Egypt’s transition
from autocracy to democracy when it ruled the country for 17 months in the
immediate aftermath of Mubarak’s departure.

The military is seeking to
pull strings from behind the façade of a military-appointed interim president,
Adly Mahmoud Mansour, rather than taking the reins in its own hand. Whatever
government emerges from the current crisis will nevertheless govern a deeply
divided country in which one substantial segment believes that the disruption
of the democratic process was designed to exclude it from participation.

The military-backed unruly
coalition of anti-Morsi liberals, leftists, Salafis and remnants of the Mubarak
regime has only common denominator: opposition to the Muslim Brotherhood. Its
future is one of increased fracturing and dissolution. The opposition’s
disarray despite its ability to stage one of the largest protests in human
history gave the military license and ability to shape Egypt’s future in its
own mold. Middle East historian Mark Levine adeptly characterised the features
of 2.5 years of protest in Egypt that has effectively kept the revolutionaries
going round in circles as: “tear gas, tanks, camels, horses, tent cities,
marches, birdshot, live ammunition, ultras, great music, torture, rape,
disappointments, spears, knives, Facebook campaigns, undercover thugs, military
detentions, men with scimitars, show trials, elections, referendums,
annulments, arson, police brutality, negotiations, machinations, committees,
strikes, street battles, foreign bailouts, extreme theatre, revolutionary
graffiti, television drama, Leninist study circles, and Salafi sit-ins.”[1]

The opposition, like the
military in line with its traditional understanding of itself, has gone to
great lengths to portray intervention of the armed forces as an expression of
the people’s will rather than a coup. There is no doubt that the military
intervention had popular support. It is too simplistic to reduce events to a
conspiracy in which the United States and Saudi Arabia together with the
military decided that it was time for Morsi to go.

There is little doubt that
the military felt that Morsi’s incompetence and intransigency was deeply
dividing the country and risked leading it down a path of economic
self-destruction, increased polarization, Islamization, anarchy, and chaos. To
be fair, the military gave Morsi the opportunity to mend his ways and let
Egyptians determine his legitimacy in a referendum. The coup was encouraged in
an environment of revolutionary fervor that allowed it to tap into widespread
popular discontent. Its preferred model was the Turkish military’s toppling of
Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan in 1997. Like the Turkish military, Egypt’s
military command issued a series of statements in the walk-up to the mass June
30 protest against Morsi and the immediate days that followed. It stepped in
when Morsi defied those calls for the protagonists to achieve a negotiated
solution and failed.

It is also too simple to
exaggerate the impact of the flow of US and European democracy funds to various
groups and leaders of the anti-Morsi coalition. US funding of non-governmental
organizations (NGOs) promoting human rights and greater transparency and
accountability was controversial since its inception under Mubarak, and was
targeted by the military after it succeeded the ousted president. Nevertheless,
the fact that NGOs fronting for opposition politicians and retired military
officers were included in the funding is certain to deepen Islamist distrust of
the United States.

Similarly, it is also simplistic
to portray Salafi groups in Egypt as Saudi stooges because of backing by the
kingdom. There is however a post-intervention divergence between the military
and the Saudis on the one hand and the West on the Over the fact that the coup
is proving not simply to be a correction in which the Brotherhood is removed
from power in advance of new elections, but in which a witch-hunt against the
group jeopardizes Egypt’s transition. This development creates the notion of a
free and fair election on a level playing field a mockery.

Perhaps most ominous in
tracing the process of engineering Morsi’s downfall is the evidence that the
accelerating shortfall of shortages in electricity and other services in the
last months of the Morsi government was as much the result of the president’s
disastrous economic policy as it was artificially engineered by institutions of
the state that he was unable to control.[2]

The role of various arms of
the state in opposing Morsi constitutes one key reason for Morsi’s demise. What
Egyptians call the deep state but what in reality are key public institutions
of the state – the military, the police and security forces, the judiciary and
segments of the media – had only conditionally accepted the rise of the Brotherhood.
They were willing to give Morsi the benefit of the doubt, committed to
resisting attempts at reform that would have given the Brotherhood control of
their institutions, and determined to intervene if he were to rock the boat.

If anything, the military’s
intervention constitutes a reaffirmation of an understanding of itself that was
first shaped by Gamal Abdel Nasser with his overthrow of the monarchy in 1952
and concentration of all power in 1954. The military sees itself as a separate
caste and the ultimate arbiter of what is good for Egypt under the guise of
executing the will of the people.

In a book published in
1955, Nasser formulated the concepts that guide the Egyptian military which has
been maintained until today. “Were we in the army not obliged to do what we did
on July 23, 1952? (…) The revolution of July 23 effectively fulfilled a great
aspiration that throbbed in the heart of the Egyptian nation ever since it
began, in the modern era, to be its own master and determine its own destiny.”[3] Referring to the 1952 coup, he went on to say:
“We felt with every fiber of our being that this task was our burden to bear,
and that if we did not fulfill it, it would be as if we turned down a sacred
task that Providence itself has imposed upon us.”[4]

Certainly, 2013 is
different from 1952 for a host of reasons. Ranking high among those is the fact
that the Egyptian military is a very different institution from the one that
first took power 61 years ago. Those differences explain why the military
bungled its 17 months in power immediately after the fall of Hosni Mubarak in
2011 and why a smooth transition towards a civilian-led democracy in Egypt in
the coming years is unlikely.

Nasser’s military was
highly politicized. Its officer corps, particularly in the artillery and
cavalry, was reformist and in favour of democracy.[5]
Nasser’s defeat of the reformists set the stage for the police state created
under President Anwar Sadat and perfected by Mubarak. It was and is a state
dominated by forces controlled by the interior rather than the defence
ministers with very different interests. Like in the first half of the 1950s,
the security forces have much to loose in a transition towards democracy while
the military has much to gain from liberalization provided it can retain its
perks and privileges. The security forces had the upper hand in 1954 and that
is also true in 2013 – if only because the military needs them.

The emergence of the police
state involved the depoliticization of the military. As a result, the Egyptian
military was effectively insulated from politics and consequently has proven to
be politically naïve and inexperienced. In addition, the power balance between
the two forces shifted. Egypt’s standing army counts half-a-million men; its
security forces have ballooned to an estimated 1.5 million and are better
connected to politics, business and crime syndicates. The military moreover
relies on the security forces to prevent the destruction of what Egyptian
sociologist Hazem Kandil terms the ‘dam of autocracy.’[6]

This development meant that
the security forces rather than the military became the face of repression
under both Mubarak and Morsi in ensuring that protests in favor of social
justice and greater freedoms did not produce anarchy. The need to guard against
anarchy and chaos was reinforced by the fact that the non-Islamist opposition
forces lack of cohesion and effective leadership. Additionally, the Brotherhood
has yet to develop the wherewithal to make the transition from a clandestine,
secretive, illegal social movement. In order to be able to effectively govern
and reach out to its critics, the Brotherhood needed to expand its skill to
survive, and its ability to mobilize as to include the tools and mindsets that
would allow it to become an inclusive political organization.

Nonetheless, General Abdel
Fatah al-Sisi, the head of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), left
little doubt about the military’s role in shaping Egypt’s future when he
addressed the nation to announce his roadmap drafted together with leaders of
the anti-Morsi movement. Al-Sisi, who is deputy prime minister and defense
minister in the post-Morsi government, repeatedly referred to the legitimacy of
the people, but not once referred to their sovereignty. “The speech is the
intellectual gloss on the July 3 coup. Its point is that Egypt is too important
to be ruled by its people. Too many regional and world powers are vested in the
direction this country takes and how it gets there. Its population will be
corralled to the side and left to practice their charming folkloric political
rituals with parliamentary elections and even presidential elections and what
have you. An arena of electoral democracy will be constructed, but many matters
of grave national import will be outside its purview. And anyway, its outcomes
can always be reversed,” wrote Egyptian blogger Baheyya.[7]

Morsi and the
Brotherhood: New kids on the block

While there is little doubt
that the Brotherhood was its own worst enemy and brought the coup upon itself,
the question of whether Morsi was indeed rocking the boat and whether his
string of ill-concieved moves would have fundamentally changed the nature of
Egyptian society and turned it into an Islamic state is a matter of debate and
perception. However, the debate on whether or not the military intervention
constituted a coup or not is not one of definition but one of trying to shape
domestic and international perceptions of recent events in Egypt, and in the
case of the United States needing to circumvent the legal consequences –
cut-off of aid and economic sanctions – of calling a spade a spade.

Military-appointed
President Adly Mansour left no doubt about the nature of the military’s
intervention by declaring that his authority stemmed exclusively from the
statement made by Al-Sisi that was published in the Official Gazette as the law
of the land with the suspension of Morsi’s constitution.[8]
The military’s transitional roadmap is however no better conceived than its
attempt in the wake of Mubarak’s fall to shape Egypt in its mold.

It is driving Egypt down
the very road that brought it to today’s crisis: a constitutional drafting
process that has the formal characteristics of inclusiveness and participation
but is drafted by a selected group of lawyers and appointees rather than by
politicians. This deflects questions of real reform, professes a willingness to
let people speak out with no guarantee that they will be heard, produces a
series of rapid succession referenda, and elections that gives people little
time to discuss and reflect, and a favoring of those who cooperated with the
coup. All of this is occurring in an environment of produced xenophobia,
repression of the Brotherhood, restrictions on the media, and an opposition
that lacks unity, cohesiveness and agrees at best on what it does not want.

Neither the military nor
the protesters – despite the expressions of support of the armed forces – have
any illusions about the nature of their relationship and its inherent
contradictions. The military’s authoritarian and patriarchal nature and goal of
preserving as much of the status quo ante to guarantee its privileges and perks
are in direct conflict with the protesters’ aims of a more open, transparent,
accountable and just society. The two sides are opportunistically using one
another playing a dangerous game that can only end in failure, if not renewed
strife. To be clear, the millions that signed the Tamarrud petition demanding
Morsi’s resignation and sparked the anti-Morsi protests signed up for new
elections rather than a return of the military to politics.

The Brotherhood offered the
military and his critics an open goalpost. Morsi was the wrong man for the job.
His inexperience, his stubbornness, his enamour with the office and his lack of
sensitivity to public opinion was his downfall.

It was by the same token
unrealistic to expect that the Brotherhood, for the first time in office after
decades of having operated clandestinely or in a legal netherland, would be
able to – overnight – make the transition from a secretive to an open,
transparent and flexible group. The Brotherhood’s traditional instincts not to
seek sole government responsibility were correct. The Brotherhood displayed
those instincts at the beginning of Egypt’s popular revolt when it initially
was reluctant to join the anti-Mubarak protests and then promised not to seek a
parliamentary majority or the presidency. Most believe that it was the
seduction of opportunity and potential power that persuaded the Brotherhood to
break those promises. The unexpected rise of the Salafis as a potent political
force contributed to the Brotherhood’s change of mind as did likely advice by
Qatar, the Brotherhood’s main foreign backer.

The justification for the
Brotherhood’s cautionary instincts and the reason why the expectation of a
stellar performance of the Morsi government lies in Turkey. It took political
Islam in Turkey some four decades to get from the intransigence of Adnan Menderes
who was executed by the military in 1960 via Erbakan who was forced out of
office in the late 1990s to current Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Erdogan, despite recent protests against him, is by and large a success story.
He has achieved significant economic growth, enhanced Turkey’s regional status
despite setbacks in Egypt and Syria, and yes, narrowed the gap between his
country’s secular and conservative communities.

The reversal of the
Brotherhood’s position was in fact predictable. The group’s history is
characterised by continuous tension in deciding whether it is a social or a
political movement. That tension explains its often disastrous decisions
motivated by a hunger for power, to cut backroom deals with the military, and
powers for which it has paid dearly in the past. The Brotherhood experienced
perhaps the worst crackdown in its history two years after the coup in 1954 by
the Free Officers. It opportunistically decided to drop its support for then
president Mohammed Naguib, a reformist military officer, in favor of Nasser who
had falsely led them, as well as the rest of the country, to believe that he
would establish a democracy.[9] In fact,
Nasser, and more importantly the security forces he had created were establishing
in cooperation with the United States and Britain. This would effectively be
the model for Arab autocracy for decades to come: a state controlled by the
police and the security forces rather than the military with multiple
variations ranging from the military being totally cut out of the power
structure to cases where it shared power.

Underlying Morsi’s downfall
are two factors. Morsi and Turkey’s Erdogan share a majoritarian interpretation
of democracy which leads them to believe that their legitimacy stems from
victory at the ballot box. The events in Egypt and Turkey illustrate that the
ballot box is one of two elements that constitute legitimacy. The other element
is acceptance by those that did not vote for the incumbent. That acceptance was
withdrawn in Egypt while the message in Turkey was: it will be withdrawn if you
don’t change and take us into account.

More fundamental in Egypt
are different conceptions of the state and society. The Brotherhood failed to
recognize that the state is an institution with its own identity and interests
rather than a vehicle to propagate and implement Islamic values and that
society is more than just the Ummah,
the community of Muslims. Ironically, the Brotherhood’s concept of the state
mirrors concepts among some of its opponents that were long prevalent among the
secular elite: the state’s function is to guarantee secular society if need be
at the expense of democracy.

Morsi’s mistake was that he
gave the forces arrayed against him reason. The deep state rejected control by
the Morsi government but was not bent on intervening. Military intervention was
an option but not a foregone conclusion. However, by late spring of 2013, that
need arose in the minds of the military and others as a result of Morsi’s inability
to successfully reach out to all segments of society and adopt a truly
inclusive approach.

Military officers did not
shy away from hinting broadly in the months before the coup that they were
waiting for the right moment to unseat Morsi. The military sought to project
itself as a selfless mediator and arbitrator unbound by partisan or commercial
interests. But it undermined its own ambition with the post-coup crackdown on
the Brotherhood and its failure to learn the lessons of Egypt’s so far failed transition.
The deep state moreover did its part in exploiting Morsi’s weaknesses and
engineering a situation that was bound to significantly complicate his life if
not become a failure. Perhaps the single event that set the stage was last
year’s disbanding of the lower house of parliament, the one institutionalized
forum for debate even if it was dominated by religious conservatives. That left
opponents of the Brotherhood with only one alternative: the street.

Fuelling that perception of
need was Morsi’s failed attempt to acquire super-constitutional powers that
would have freed him of judicial oversight. The rise of militant groups in the
Sinai backed by attempts by religious figures to impose Islamic law in some
parts of the peninsula, the threat to use military force against Ethiopia to
enforce what Egypt long has viewed as its rights to the waters of the Nile, his
suggestion that Egyptians could join the anti-Bashar jihadin Syria, his
nomination of a governor of Luxor who was associated with a group responsible
for assassination of Sadat and the killing of 57 tourists in the late 1990s,
and his failure to stand-up for minority rights when he stood on the same dias
as a Salafi preacher who denounced Egypt’s tiny Shiite community as infidels.
The economic deterioration under Morsi and his inability to deliver let alone
maintain services stood moreover in stark contrast to the Brotherhood’s
provision of services that were lacking in the Mubarak era. To be fair, Morsi
inherited an economy with huge structural problems that stem from a scarcity of
resources, rapid population growth, decades of corruption and nepotistic
authoritarian rule.

Nevertheless, the sum total
of Morsi’s failures falls short of what could be described as a grab to take
full control of all of the state’s key institutions, let alone Islamize the
state in its entirety. This is witnessed by the continued independence of the
deep state, Morsi’s efforts for much of his period in office to accommodate the
military, his more-or-less hands-off approach towards the interior ministry and
the security forces that are in dire need of thorough reform, and his failure
to make effective inroards into the culture ministry. In fact, Morsi, while in
government, gave the military what it wanted: the replacement of the old guard
by the second echelon of command, and preservation of its privileges and perks
– control of national security, protection of its independent relationship with
the United States, immunity against prosecution, maintenance of its commercial empire
that accounts for at least 10 percent of Egyptian GDP, and no civilian
oversight.

Nevertheless, Morsi’s core
failure may be his inability or unwillingness to take on the one segment of the
deep state at the root of the resistance to Mubarak’s regime that was building
up in the stadiums in the last four years of the ousted autocrat’s rule and
exploded on Police Day in January 2011 on Tahrir Square: the Ministry of
Interior and the police and security forces it controls. The gap between Morsi
and the security forces was widened by Morsi’s efforts to evade police reform
by legalizing armed private security services.

Morsi’s failure was
compounded by the failure of the security forces, Egypt’s most hated
institution because of its enforcement of the Mubarak era repression, to
formulate a vision of their own in a post-revolt environment. Instead, they
opted to lie low so as not to provoke further animosity. They hoped that their
absence and a decline of law and order would position them as the force that stood
between Egypt and the abyss. The failure of the security forces’ leadership to
redefine itself in a post-revolt environment was encouraged by the military’s
opposition to real reform and calls for independent police trade unions,
improved accountability, rules governing promotion, and training by reformist
officers who – if acknowledged – could have sparked a similar development
within the armed forces. The armed forces have been more successful in ensuring
cohesion despite differences between the middle class officers corps and the
lower class rank and file. That cohesion notwithstanding, army chief Sisi,
concerned about Brothehood inroads into the military, sent elite troops to
units of the 2nd Field Army, which is under command of Lt. Gen Ahmed
Wasfy, immediately after meeting Morsi to demand his resignation. He then
discovered that Morsi had sent envoys to the units. Wasfy and some of his units
are believed to be potentially sympathetic to the Brotherhood. Denying
allegations of a possible split in the military, Wasfy told the Associated
Press: “We are united. The culture and principles of the armed forces don’t
allow divisions.”[10]One reason why the police
unlike the military has reformists within its ranks is the fact that military
personnel enjoyed economic and financial personnel that lower level police
offices lacked, making them on the one hand more corrupt, dependent on getting bakshish for their
services and more connected to criminal networks that often were employed to do
the Mubarak’s regime’s dirty work. On the other hand, this made many in the
police more inclined towards change.

As a result, the police
force is split. The force had little reason to support Morsi and the
Brotherhood but significant segments of it are less committed than the military
to the road on which Egypt has now embarked. The police and security forces
have taken note of the fact that the military has succeeded in retaining a
degree of popular support that they lack. Herein lies the danger that the
fallout of Morsi will be a weakening of the reformists in the security sector
in favor of those who see liberalization as an undermining of their power.

The Salafis and the
Brotherhood: Can they Weather this Crisis?

Recent events in Egypt are
widely viewed as the Brotherhood having lost the upper hand to the Saudi-backed
Salafists. The rivalry between the Salafis and the Brotherhood reflects not
only political differences but also those between a majority of Gulf states led
by Saudi Arabia and Qatar. One reason the Salafists did almost as well as the
Brotherhood in post-revolt Egypt’s first parliamentary election was that they
in many ways were closer to their grassroots than the Brotherhood. It’s the
image of the upstart Salafi travelling to a poor neighboorhood in Cairo by
public transport or cheap taxi versus the established Brotherhood politician
arriving in his privately owned car.

Ultimately, however, the
Salafis puritan worldview is even less attractive to a majority of admittedly
religious Egyptians than that of the Brotherhood against which a majority
revolted. The knowledge that the Salafis have strong roots in only a sliver of
Egypt is what allowed the Nour Party to straddle both sides of the fence: first
endorsing Morsi’s conservative constitution and then supporting the
anti-Brotherhood revolt and military intervention.

Those Salafi groups and
parties that were less adept than Nour at playing politics have threatened to
revert to violence if political Islam is refused a seat at the table in the
wake of Morsi’s downfall. It would be premature however to predict that Egypt
is travelling down the brutal and bloody road that Algeria followed in 1991
after Islamists were denied the opportunity to consume their electoral victory.
That road ended in years of civil war and a quarter of a million dead. The
emergence this month of Ansar al-Sharia in the Sinai that claimed
responsibility for attacks on the military, builds on the fact that since the
successful crackdown on jihadist groups in the 1990s. There were only two
groups that physically resisted the Mubarak regime: Bedouins in the remote,
lawless desert and soccer fans in stadiums.

That is not to say that
there will not be incidents of political violence. The Brotherhood unlike the
Algerian Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) had a long history of moving from
violence to non-violence and was initially allowed to take office. Despite its
deep-seated sense of victimhood, critics within its ranks recognize that Morsi
is as much as anyone to blame for the group’s predicament. In addition, Egypt
unlike Algeria is in the throws of popular revolution with a majority. In
contrast to Algeria, Egypt is supporting the role of the military. Its
jihadists embarked on a non-violent path a decade ago after being crushed by
the military. Egypt’s revolutionary fervor coupled with the role of the Nour
Party is likely to continue to counter the assertion of Al Qaida leader Ayman
al-Zawahiri and other jihadists that jihad is the only path that does not
strengthen un-Islamic rule.

The intensity of the
Saudi-led Gulf counter-revolution notwithstanding, it would be wrong to write
the Brotherhood off. The Brotherhood has weathered adversity for much of its
existence. It is its strength as well as it weakness. Nasser Square in Eastern
Cairo and officials like Mohammed El-Beltagy – for whom there is an arrest
warrant out – represent its strength. Hundreds of thousands are camped out in
the Square much like anti-Mubarak protesters did in early 2011. El-Beltagy and
others wanted Brotherhood executives are among them. The cost of executing
their arrest warrants is not one the military and the security forces can
afford. The Brotherhood’s mobilization capability and continued peaceful
protest draw a stark contrast with the military’s arrest warrants and targeting
of media and businesses owned by Brothers.

Moreover, Nasser Square
constitutes living proof that Islamists in general and the Brotherhood in
particular retain a significant popular base. The Brotherhood’s ability to
maintain its base is fuelled by its sense of victimhood reinforced by the
recent coup. Morsi’s failures have caused the Brotherhood significant damage.
Some of that damage is countered by the failure of liberals, leftists,
secularists and youth groups to develop credible alternatives in the 30 months
since Mubarak’s downfall. They appear to be able to agree and mobilize only on
what they do not want despite their creation of a loose umbrella, the National
Salvation Front (NSF).

In a Pew Research Poll some
six weeks before the coup, 52 percent of those queried gave Morsi a positive
rating while only 45 percent approved of the NSF.[11]
Morsi’s ratings are likely to have dropped since. The question is whether the
NSF is the beneficiary.

There is little reason to
believe that various pillars of the anti-Morsi movement would perform in
government much better than the ousted president. Initial indications from the
military-backed government suggest the anti-Morsi forces have failed to ignore
one key message from the president’s downfall: ignore the economy at your
peril. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Kuwait – Gulf states hostile
to the Brotherhood – have thrown the military and the military-backed
government a life line with $12 billion in immediate aid. The aid has allowed
the government to entertain rejecting like its predecessor a $4.8 billion
International Monetary Fund (IMF) loan that would have forced it to introduce
the unpopular reforms needed to tackle the economy’s structural problems.[12]To be sure if Morsi would
have had a checklist of what not to do, he would have ticked off every box. A
different scenario may have unfolded if Khatter al Shatter, a powerhouse within
the Brotherhood, would not have been disqualified for the presidential race
because of a conviction under Mubarak on political grounds. Unlike Morsi, Al
Shatter is a successful, wealthy businessman who may have better understood
entrepreneurial spirit, risk, the give and take of negotiation, economic needs
and communication concepts stemming from his familiarity with marketing. Morsi
reinforced fault lines in which distrust and mutual suspicion run deep. Some of
his measures like appointing party cronies to office that would have elsewhere
been percieved as a normal practice deepened the divide and suspicion that the
Brotherhood was not really committed to a pluralistic democracy.

Is There A Way
Forward?

As a result, Egypt is
rendered with two antagonistic camps that each sees itself as the defender of
democracy and the spirit of the more than two year-old popular revolt. Each
believes that it has the wherewithal and resources to fight this out in an
environment in which mutual suspicion and distrust has been cemented.

Egypt’s coup puts the
Brotherhood at a crossroads. It can opt for the Salafi model involving
acceptance that its grassroots constitute a minority and that it needs to keep
one foot in and one foot outside the system. Alternatively, it licks its
wounds, learns lessons from its failure, and returns to its long-standing
instinct of biding its time. The Brotherhood’s recent history and its
long-standing desire to be a political group with a mass following, despite its
most recent failure, mitigates towards the second choice. A key factor
influencing its decision making is likely to be the military’s ability to
demonstrate that it is serious about allowing the Brotherhood to compete as one
among equals in the country’s next elections. Despite verbal statements by the
military and the president to that effect, that is not the message the military
has conveyed with its post-coup crackdown on the Brotherhood.

Complicating the
Brotherhood’s decision-making process is the fact that it has seen a steady
drain of its more progressive elements that started under Mubarak and gathered
speed with the demise of the autocrat. That in part explains the difficulty the
group has in making the transition from secrecy, its fear of external threats
and a view of politics as a zero sum game associated with clandestinity and
legal uncertainty to the kind of inclusiveness, outreach, and transparency that
characterizes electoral politics. The question is whether the Brotherhood can
shed its posture as a victim to recognize that what it decides, will – to a large
extent– determine whether Egypt can progress towards democracy. Brotherhood
participation in that process is a sine qua non.

The military crackdown
allows the Brotherhood to delay facing its own demons. Continuous mobilization
and confrontation with the military enables it to maintain cohesion and count
on a repetition of history. The Brotherhood’s ranks and support swelled in the
past whenever it was repressed. The crackdown also allows it to portray itself
as the underdog and paper over divisions within the group that would likely
only be deepened by debate over who is responsible for its most recent debacle.
For now, the Brotherhood’s strategy is working witness the apparently large
numbers of non-Brother Islamists who have joined the pro-Morsi protests out of
fear of a return of the Mubarak-era repression.

The best case scenario for
Egypt in the absence of a reform wing within the military that is able to
assert itself is the emergence of an imperfect democracy, guided by the
military in which over time the armed forces would be submitted to civilian
control. Turkey is the obvious example but also an indictment of the failure of
the US and Europe to help create the circumstances for real democracy. Prime
Minister Erdogan was able to finally subject the military to civilian control
because he was given a straight jacket: the prospect of European Union
membership.

For all the efforts of the
United States and the EU to strike a balance between their support for
autocracy in a bid to maintain regional stability and support for the
development of a strong and healthy civil society they exempted the one force
that inevitably would play a key role in any transition: the military. As a
result in contrast to Southeast Asian nations, like the Philippines, Indonesia,
Thailand and Myanmar, there is no reformist wing of the military in Egypt, or
for that matter in any other Arab country, that can lead the country from
autocracy to democracy. The absence of such a reformist wing means that the
military sees transition as a threat rather than an opportunity. Stay tuned:
there is more drama to come.

James M. Dorsey is a
Senior Fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies as Nanyang
Technological University in Singapore, co-director of the Institute of Fan
Culture of the University of Würzburg, and the author of the blog, The Turbulent World of Middle East
Soccer.

Tuesday, July 23, 2013

The battle between Iran and various Gulf state for the
identity of the energy-rich region has spilled onto its soccer pitches. It’s
the Persian Gulf League vs. the Arabian Gulf League.

The struggle erupted when the United Arab Emirates,
alongside Saudi Arabia, the Gulf’s most fervent opponent of political Islam,
recently renamed its premier league as the Arabian Gulf League. The Iranian
football federation, whose own top league, the Persian Gulf League adheres to
the Islamic republic’s position in the war of semantics, responded by blocking
the transfer of Iranian players to UAE clubs and breaking the contracts of
those who had already moved.

The war has stopped Iran’s national team captain Javad Nekounam
from being sold for $2 million to UAE club Al Sharjah. "We had to stop him
from joining the Emirati league. We will ask the president (Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad) to allocate" funds to compensate Mr. Nekounam for his loss,
said Iranian football federation head Ali Kafashian. Quoted by Fars news agency, Mr. Kafashian
said another eight or nine players had also been prevented from moving to the
UAE.

“The Persian Gulf will always be the Persian Gulf. Money is
worthless in comparison to the name of my motherland. I received an offer from
Al Sharjah three months ago and noone forced me to deny it, but I refused to do
so myself. I would never join a team from a league offending the name of the
Persian Gulf,” Mr. Nekounam said on Iranian state television.

The Iranian federation, which has long been micro-managed
from behind the scenes by Mr. Ahmadinejad, made its move three weeks before the
president steps down and is succeeded by president-elect Hassan Rouhani, a
centrist politician and cleric who many hope will seek to improve strained
relations with Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states.

The kingdom together with the UAE and Bahrain have accused
Iran of interfering in their domestic affairs by fuelling Shiite anti-government
protests. They are also at loggerheads over Syria with Iran backing embattled
President Bashar al-Assad and the Gulf states supporting rebels opposed to him.
The animosity has fuelled a widening sectarian gap in the region between Sunni
and Shiite Muslims.

The UAE moreover has its own gripes against Iran because of
the Islamic republic’s four decade-old occupation of three potentially oil-rich
islands claimed by the Emirates that are located near key shipping routes at
the entrance to the Strait of Hormuz. The UAE last year declared a boycott of
Iranian players which it did not implement in a bid to pressure Iran to return
the islands and put its controversial nuclear program under international
supervision.

A year earlier, the UAE became with remarks made by its
ambassador to the United States, Yousef al-Otaiba, the first Gulf state to
publicly endorse military force to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power.

The UAE has in recent years further worked to link more
closely its security to U.S. and European security interests. France inaugurated
in Abu Dhabi its first military base in the region. The base, which comprises
three sites on the banks of the Strait of Hormuz, houses a naval and air base
as well as a training camp, and is home to 500 French troops. Alongside other
smaller Gulf states, the UAE has further agreed to the deployment of U.S.
anti-missile batteries on its territory.

UAE clubs signaled this week that they would comply with the
Iranian boycott in a move that strengthens Emirati resistance to Iranian
policies. "We don't want to be drawn into a political warfare and if it is
true, the club management will take necessary action to avoid any
confrontations," said an official of the Sharjah club that was negotiating
with Mr. Nekounam. Mr. Kafashian said it was negotiating with Ajman to break
the contract of Iran’s Mohammed Reza Khalatbari who had transferred before the
Iranian football federation declared its decision to bar Iranian players from
moving to the UAE.

James M. Dorsey is Senior Fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of
International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University in Singapore,
co-director of the Institute of Fan Culture of the University of Würzburg and
the author of the blog, The
Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer.

Thursday, July 18, 2013

James M Dorsey reports on the successes that football teams have had
in helping immigrant communities to integrate with wider society, observing
that football can be a useful indicator of how well integration policies are
working across Europe

The phones ring continuously at Kurdish
football club Dalkurd FF, a hot team for agents and players. In 2009, it signed
Bosnian international Nedim Halilovic and upcoming Algerian-Swedish star Nadir
Benchenaa. More prominent signings are in the works. Started in 2004 with the
support of top Swedish football club IK Brage as a project to create jobs for
Kurdish youth, Dalkurd’s meteoric rise has put it on the international football
map and turned it into a model of how a Middle Eastern immigrant community can
address its social and economic problems and project its identity.

Dalkurd, one of three Swedish clubs that
have fielded Europe’s most successful immigrant teams, was founded in Borlänge,
a small iron and paper mill workers’ town of some 50,000 predominantly
ethnically Swedish residents 220 km north of Stockholm. The club was initially
launched as a project to create jobs for the youth. Dalkurd’s Swedish identity
is clearly identifiable on maps; its minority Kurdish identity is not. That
makes Dalkurd as much a product of the social and economic challenges facing
immigrants in Sweden and elsewhere in Europe as it is of the carve-up of the
Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century that turned Kurds into the largest
nation without a homeland, and scattered them across the Middle East and the
globe. It also highlights Sweden’s relative success in integrating minorities
from southern Europe and North Africa who in the 1960s and 70s began
immigrating to western and northern Europe, which at the time were encouraging
labour migration.

Dalkurd, like other immigrant teams and
players, turns football into a prism through which to view how Europe is being
shaped by significant Muslim migration and uses the game as a barometer of
successes and failures in integration policy. It also spotlights football’s
ability to encourage bonding and the development of separate, often
multi-layered, identities that help groups to find a common ground and also to
differentiate themselves from one another.

National teams,
international squads
On a continental scale, a third of all goals in major European competitions in
recent years were scored by either foreign-born players or those from immigrant
families. These footballers account for almost half of the players in the
continent’s national teams. Of the 2,600 professional players in the five top
European leagues – England, Spain, Italy, Germany and France – 800 are
expatriates born and recruited in an often Muslim country, and another 500 are
immigrants or their descendants.

The
three Swedish teams formed by Kurds or Assyrians/Syriacs – two groups that
faced off with each other in the early 20th century in rugged eastern Turkey –
thrive in a country that is the most welcoming in Europe to non-EU immigrants.
Sweden stands out at a time of economic crisis as a nation that has been able
to maintain a welfare state and pay for it too.1 As
a result, Sweden hosts more than 25 Assyrian/Syriac clubs alone2 as
well as a score of less-prominent Kurdish ones.

Dalkurd’s
initial players were Kurdish migrants and refugees, and their descendants.
Kurdish immigrants moved to Europe in search of more fertile economic pastures
and to escape the suppression of their cultural identity and political rights
in Turkey. Elvan Cicen, Dalkurd’s co-founder and sports director, says that,
instinctively, the founders thought of naming the club Kurdistan, but on
reflection opted for Dalkurd: Dal for Dalarna, the region where Borlänge is
located, and Kurd for Kurdistan.3 Dalarna’s famous wooden horses frame the yellow
sun on the red, white and green Kurdish flag that the club adopted as its own

“We
are both Kurdish and Swedish. Football is our tool to integrate people. We took
kids off the streets and away from the gangs. Everybody blamed the kids. But
the real problem was the parents, who often were analphabets. The kids lived in
different worlds in school and at home. The parents didn’t see what was
happening and the kids weren’t integrated. We started involving the parents,”
Cicen says.4 Dalkurd
players have become role models in local high schools. They have sparked a
cultural revolution, inspiring girls to form their own team with the support of
Dalkurd managers who seek to overcome the objections put forward by
conservative parents.

Dalkurd’s leadership, much like that of
other immigrant communities, draws a distinction between integration and
assimilation. “Integration is not assimilation. It’s learning a new culture
without losing one’s own. Even if we had Kurdistan, I wouldn’t move there.
Sure, my parents didn’t come here to be Swedes. They socialise only with the
Kurdish part of Dalkurd. I’m trying to learn from both cultures. Having two
cultures is being richer. We would lose if we were only a Kurdish team. They
call us the Kurdish national team. That is not a problem but we don’t close the
door to other people,” Cicen says.

Cicen’s
philosophy is backed up by research that shows that sport serves as an
integrative tool, or in the words of sports anthropologist Paul Verweel, an
enabler of social participation5 through clubs that have an open culture and
ideology6 with
football being a sport more obsessed with ethnicity than many others.7 That
open culture is further encouraged by the fact that both Dalkurd and the
Assyrian teams appeal to a fan base that is not purely local but includes a
regional, and even global, diaspora. Their self-image as teams that represent a
nation rather than just a local community means they are rooted both in the
municipality that hosts them and a more geographically diverse community. The
internet allows them to maintain bonds across boundaries by broadcasting their
matches live on the web and including far-away supporters in their fan
networks.

For Kurds, the dream of nationhood is a
more realistic one than it is for Assyrians. While Assyrians acknowledge that
their hopes for a home state are likely to remain a dream, Kurds can point to
an Iraqi Kurdistan as a state-in-waiting with all the building blocks in place.
Tumultuous events in Syria are likely to result in Kurds gaining more rights
and the government in Turkey has been willing to negotiate with guerrillas who
fought a war over almost two decades in which at least 40,000 people died.
Nonetheless, Dalkurd is making its mark not in Iraqi Kurdistan, Iran, Turkey or
Syria, but in Sweden, where it has won league after league as a Swedish team
with a dual identity. Half of its players are the sons and daughters of parents
who sought relief from economic under-development and suppression; the
remainder are Swedes and other foreigners. Even so, its fans largely include
refugees, and their Swedish-born descendants, who fled religious and ethnic
discrimination in Turkey and Iran, and Saddam Hussein’s ethnic cleansing of
Kurds in northern Iraq. Dalkurd’s sponsors are predominantly Swedish-Kurdish
businessmen.

Kurdish members of Dalkurd’s board do
not hide their empathy for the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK), the guerrilla
group that fought Turkish security forces in south-eastern Turkey. The PKK has,
in recent years, dropped its demand for an independent Kurdish state in favour
of full cultural and political rights within the framework of the Turkish
state. Officials in Iraqi Kurdistan, where the PKK has bases, suggest that the
group has helped fund Dalkurd, a claim the club’s executives deny.
Nevertheless, Dalkurd chairman Ramazan Kizil, a Kurdish immigrant from Turkey,
was sentenced in 2010 in absentia to 10 months in prison in his homeland after
giving a speech in his native Kurdish and campaigning on behalf of a
pro-Kurdish political party. Kizil’s ambition is to take Dalkurd into the UEFA
Europa League, where he dreams of unfurling the Kurdish alongside the Swedish
flag. Iraqi Kurdistan has long campaigned unsuccessfully to become a member of
FIFA with a status like that of Palestine, the only member without a country,
or England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, all of which compete
separately rather than as the United Kingdom.

The
VIVA World Cup
In doing so, he would put a dent in Kurdistan’s status as a football outcast.
Kurdish players are international stars and Kurdish clubs dominate the Iraqi
league, but the Kurdish flag flies only at the VIVA World Cup, a tournament
that operates by a different set of standards to those of FIFA. VIVA
competitors are teams that hail from a tribal area, an agricultural province,
an occupied nation, a semi-autonomous region, an ancient city-state, a
disenfranchised minority enclave or a nation that is not recognised by
football’s international governing body. “The goal is ideological,” says
Jean-Luc Kit, vice president of the New Federation Board, VIVA’s organiser.
“It’s about allowing peoples to exist through sport.”8 In
VIVA, Iraqi Kurds, who are the closest to statehood than Kurds have ever come,
and hosted the VIVA tournament in 2012, join fellow aspirant nations, such as
Provence, the former Roman province of Raetia in Switzerland, Occitania, the
Western Sahara, Darfur, Northern Cyprus, Zanzibar and Greenland – a country
that FIFA does not recognise in part because it is too cold to grow adequate
grass there.

The goal of
integration
If Dalkurd advances into the UEFA Europa League, the club would also achieve
another goal: it would symbolise Kurdish integration into Sweden in much the
same way that the country’s two other top performing immigrant teams from the
industrial town of Södertälje, 35 km south of Stockholm, did for the
Assyrian/Syriac community. Ironically, the split among Assyrians in Södertälje,
where they account for a quarter of the population, over how to refer to their
community in Swedish – depending on whether one emphasises religion and church
or the ancient national characteristics of the group – reflects the degree to
which they have integrated into their adopted homeland. Assyrians, unlike Kurds,
immigrated to Sweden in the knowledge that they were unlikely to ever witness
the resurrection of their homeland as a national entity. “We were born here. We
don’t know exactly what happened over there. Sweden is good. It is our country.
We have no other country. I would never want to live in Turkey. I go there on
vacation and come back. Turkey is not for our people. When we play there, they
stamp our passports at the border and throw them at us. They don’t like us,”
said Syriac football player Robert Massi.

The
split within the community has sparked two rival football teams. Each sees
itself as the national squad of a disenfranchised nation. There are also two
satellite television stations that broadcast in multiple languages, two
churches, and a playground for criminal and foreign interests. The differing
interpretations of history and identity are highlighted in symbols and chants
during Södertälje’s derby.9 Assyriska FF fans boast tattoos of the Assyrian
god Ashur while those of Syrianska FC display Christian symbolism or Syriac
script on their bare upper bodies. Assyriska fans rolled out a huge flag
portraying a medieval patriarch with a sword in commemoration of the mass
killing of Assyrians in 1915 and an image of the Ishtar Gate in ancient Babel
during the 2009 derby.10 Similarly, fans of both clubs often lace their
debates about their teams with historic and religious references designed to
prove their differing perceptions on whether the Assyrian kingdom will ever be
resurrected and to what degree Assyrians can be distinguished from their
church. The differing expressions of support constitute a continuous
negotiation of what it means to be an Assyrian or Syriac.11

The football pitch serves as their
platform for becoming part of a new society while at the same time maintaining
past cultural identity and resisting efforts to marginalise their national and
religious roots. As such, the battles on the pitch are an extension of issues
Assyrians and Syriacs confront in their daily lives.

If history and cultural tradition
defines the Assyrian/Syriac and Kurdish communities in Södertälje and Borlänge,
so does concern about the blood-drenched popular revolt in Syria, intermittent
clashes between Turkish security forces and the PKK in predominantly Kurdish south-eastern
Turkey, and the spectre of the two meshing with Kurds becoming pawns in the
struggle for the survival of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s embattled
regime. Those fears are reinforced by: the influx of Christian refugees from
Iraq and, more recently, Syria; concerns about the rise of Islamism and the
Muslim Brotherhood in Turkey, Syria and post-revolt Middle Eastern and North
African nations; links between some Assyrians and Israel; and the grip of
pro-Assad elements on the institutions of one significant faction of
Assyrians.

The
decision of Ignatius IV Hazim, the late patriarch of Antioch, to back Assad12 highlighted
the split in the community and raised concerns that the community might be seen
in Sweden as supportive of the Syrian leader’s brutal regime. Football managers
fear that such an image could undermine their efforts to project themselves as
symbols of integration in a country traditionally sympathetic to their community,
which migrated to stay and constitutes an economic success story. The community
has produced one former minister and a number of well-known journalists. Yet
Assyrians and Syriacs, like the Kurds, feel that no matter how integrated they
are and how good their Swedish is they continue to be viewed as outsiders by
Swedish society. “I have been here for 40 years but I am still a foreigner.
They never make you feel a part of their country. I did my military service
here, I play golf and I speak Swedish. But because of my name and hair colour,
they treat me differently. I’m still thankful,” says Assyriska executive Aziz
Jacob.13

The
perception that there is support for Assad from a significant segment of the
community strengthens Swedish suspicions of links between the clubs and
organised crime. These were reinforced by the recent trial of 17 people,
including two Syrian nationals, on murder, blackmail and other charges
involving Assyrian football in Södertälje.14 The fears are most prevalent among officials and
supporters of Syrianska FC, the team aligned with the church of Ignatius IV
Hazim. Ghayath Moro, a former Syrianska board member who now serves as the
unelected head of security, fled Syria in the 1970s and arrived in Sweden
aboard a United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCR) flight from
Lebanon. Moro’s unelected position of power in Syrianska serves as evidence for
its Assyriska rivals that theirs is a more forward-looking, professionally run
club in which officials are held accountable. To Assyriska officials and
supporters, professionalism is a code word for ‘better integrated’ in Sweden.
Assyriska officials note that their meetings are conducted in Swedish while
those of Syrianska are in Aramaic. Swedish football association officials point
out that Syrianska is managed by a small core group that has full control while
Assyriska has a more professionally constituted board.15 In
many ways, the split in the community that has been formalised in rival
football teams has become one about the nature and degree of integration, with
football as a manifestation of differing perceptions of history and culture.
The differing perceptions are also reflected in the Syrian Orthodox Church’s
close-knit ties with Syrianska, which are viewed by Assyriska supporters as a
dangerous mingling of national and cultural identity.

Lulu Shanku, a Syrianska star who in
2011 stopped playing for the Syrian national team, freely describes the
corruption in Syrian football and the intimidation of players by the Assad
regime – until Moro joins the conversation. Replying to a question posed to
Shanku about the fate of Mosab Balhous, the Syrian national team’s goalkeeper
who initially vanished two years ago after reportedly being accused by the
Assad regime of being an Islamist, Moro says: “Mosab disappeared because of one
of the gangsters against the regime.” According to a senior Syrian football
official, now a refugee in Jordan, Balhous resurfaced in Syria in 2013, though
he could not explain his two-year disappearance.

Using terminology employed by the
regime, Moro denounces Syrian protesters and rebels as “gangsters” and accuses
the United States, Israel and Al Qaeda of waging war against Assad. “It is
clear that the people want Assad,” Moro says. “The gangsters bombed our church
in Khaldiye [an embattled neighbourhood of the city of Homs where Balhous
originates and where another national goalkeeper is an opposition leader]. Too
many Christians died. Christians are 10 per cent of the population. We have two
ministers [in Syria]. Christians and Syrians have always lived in peace and had
good relations.” He says the siege of Homs has, since the bombing, enabled
Assad to “clean” the city.

Younger Assyrians and Syriacs raised in
Sweden, with its long history of social democratic government, feel uneasy with
Moro’s unabashed support for a regime whose ruthlessness has made it a pariah.
They too, however, express concerns about the fate of the Christian minority in
a post-Assad era. They feel more comfortable with Moro’s expression of
frustration with a perceived lack of acceptance by Swedish society. “The Swedes
don’t want us to succeed. We’re ambitious, that is what sets us apart. We try
all the time to build bridges. It is not easy because we are a foreign team and
always will be a foreign team. They don’t see us as Swedes… and the Swedish
media do not show our good side,” Moro says, referring to reports on Södertälje
football’s links to criminal groups. Describing Syrianiska as a tool to keep
youth from drifting into alcohol and drug abuse, Moro blames the city’s
criminality on high unemployment and an influx of refugees from Iraq, many of
whom are unregistered. He says an increase in police officers had made streets
safe again.

The
perception that society is failing to embrace the descendents of immigrants as
equals is even stronger on German football pitches. Take the case of Nuri
Sahin, for example. He was heralded a future star at age 16. He was the
youngest player ever to compete in Germany’s Bundesliga, the country’s premier
league. A German-born Turk with an infatuating smile, Sahin had secured his
place in Germany’s national football team. The German Football Association did
everything to persuade him to grab the opportunity, but to no avail. Sahin,
like many top German-Turkish footballers, was determined to play for Turkey,
asserting that he may have been born in Germany but that at the bottom line he
was Turkish.16 In his first international game, he scored the winning
goal – against Germany.

Sahin’s refusal to play for Germany is
the product of a country that until recently refused to give citizenship even
to those children of immigrants that were born in Germany. Yet, it shocked
Germans, who see their national football team as proof that they are
successfully integrating their seven million immigrants. With German spoken
almost as much in Istanbul clubs as it is in German clubs, Sahin’s decision and
the talent drain it represents are a loss and a tell-tale sign of Germany’s
struggle with the integration of immigrants.

At the same time, it also tells the
story of football’s cross-fertilising effect, not only in Europe but beyond the
continent’s borders. The German Turks bring German virtues to Turkey and badly
needed talent to European clubs. Football further bridges identities and
constitutes a sort of reverse reconciliation, as is the case with France, whose
French-born players join teams of their parents’ heritage in Algeria and
elsewhere across the Mediterranean.

The cross-fertilisation
effect
The cross fertilisation goes a step further. The ultras – militant, highly
organised, highly politicised, street-battle hardened football fans in Egypt
and elsewhere in the Middle East and North Africa – trace their roots and model
themselves on similar groups in Italy and Serbia. It was a German-Tunisian
football player, Sami Khedira, who sparked the first crisis in post-revolt
Tunisia between the media and the Islamist Ennahda-led government. Staff at
Attounissia newspaper were arrested in February 2013 for reprinting a revealing
cover of GQ Magazine on which Khedira, dressed in a tuxedo, covers with his
hands the breasts of his otherwise naked girlfriend, German model Lena
Gercke.

If Germany’s struggle with immigration
is a story of two steps forward, one step back, across the Rhine in France,
home to western Europe’s largest Muslim community, it’s one step forward, two
steps back. Germans feted their 2010 multi-cultural World Cup squad as proof of
the new Germany, a country where integration of Muslim immigrants is succeeding
even if it remains cumbersome 10 years after offering, for the first time,
citizenship to the German-born offspring of migrants. Germany’s success,
moreover, loomed large against the backdrop of the disintegration in South
Africa of the French national squad, a damming condemnation of France’s
integration policy.

In fact, when the jet carrying the
disgraced French team home landed on the tarmac in Paris it resembled an
aircraft being sequestered for security or safety reasons. The plane stood
there for an hour with its doors closed as the French media, government
ministers and politicians denounced the football team as scum, trouble-makers
and ‘guys with peas in their heads instead of brains,’ who were led by a
captain who refused to sing the Marseillaise. The team made the kind of football
history that Frenchmen would prefer to forget about: they were the first team
ever to go on strike during a World Cup tournament and turned France into a
global laughing stock.

Right wingers compared the players, many
of whom hailed from immigrant suburbs, to hooded youths who set fire to cars on
Saturday nights. Centre-right ministers echoed far-right National Front leader
Marine Le Pen’s denunciation of the team before the World Cup. She said the
squad did not represent France and were more interested in commercial
endorsements than national pride. Her comments came in response to Zinedine
Zidane, the French-born scion of Algerian immigrants. Zidane is married to a
Spaniard whose children have Christian names, and who is widely viewed as one
of the best players of his generation. He describes himself as “first a Kabyle
[Berber] from La Castellane [a neighborhood of Marseille], then an Algerian
from Marseille, and then a Frenchman”.

This was all a far cry from the days of
glory in 1998, when a victorious black-white-Arab team united the country. The
question is: what went wrong? The answer to some degree is former French
president Nicolas Sarkozy’s focus on money and individualism that reinforced
social and urban segregation, hardened the religious and cultural divide and
fed post-9/11 prejudice against Muslims. Yet football was an indicator of the
disintegration that predated Sarkozy and led to the World Cup disgrace.

The hijab as a
cultural symbol
By the same token, Denmark, a country that in recent years has adopted a
tougher stance on immigration, emerged as an unlikely catalyst in the
acceptance of women who choose to wear the hijab on the football pitch. In 2008
the Danish Football Association backed Zainab al Khatib, a 15-year-old star
striker of Palestinian origin who carried the banner in Europe for women
demanding the right to play with their heads covered. Its support inspired a
campaign to portray the headdress as a cultural rather than a religious symbol.
That distinction ultimately persuaded the International Football Association
Board, the body that governs the rules of professional football, to rule in
2012 that religiously observant women could wear a headdress that meets their
cultural requirements, as well as standards of safety and security. The Danish
support for Al Khatib was remarkable as it came at a time that parliaments in
France, Belgium and Spain were imposing restrictions on Muslim women’s
garb.

Khatib became the first covered national
football player in Europe to be successfully fielded by her team. She wears a
black scarf tightly wrapped around her head when she unleashes her lightning
fast and nimble skills, and extraordinary her ability to score with a header.
The Danish association defended the headscarf of its Under-18 national team’s
most promising forward as a cultural rather than a religious commitment and
compared it to the headband of Brazilian midfielder Ronaldinho Gaucho, which
also violates FIFA’s insistence that all players should be dressed identically.

The Danish association’s support of Al
Khatib set an example for the coalition of female European and Asian football
executives and trainers, and Middle Eastern women players led by FIFA vice
president Prince Ali Bin Al Hussein of Jordan, which successfully campaigned
for FIFA and IFAB’s lifting of the ban on women’s headdress.

The football pitch has become an
important tool for integration and a measure of the success of European
integration policies. As such, it constitutes a barometer that local, regional
and national policymakers in Europe cannot afford to ignore.

James M Dorsey is a
senior fellow at the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies at
Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University, Co-director of the Institute of
Fan Culture at the University of Würzburg, and the author of The Turbulent
World of Middle East Soccer blog

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About Me

James M DorseyWelcome to The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer by James M. Dorsey, a senior fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies. Soccer in the Middle East and North Africa is played as much on as off the pitch. Stadiums are a symbol of the battle for political freedom; economic opportunity; ethnic, religious and national identity; and gender rights. Alongside the mosque, the stadium was until the Arab revolt erupted in late 2010 the only alternative public space for venting pent-up anger and frustration. It was the training ground in countries like Egypt and Tunisia where militant fans prepared for a day in which their organization and street battle experience would serve them in the showdown with autocratic rulers. Soccer has its own unique thrill – a high-stakes game of cat and mouse between militants and security forces and a struggle for a trophy grander than the FIFA World Cup: the future of a region. This blog explores the role of soccer at a time of transition from autocratic rule to a more open society. It also features James’s daily political comment on the region’s developments. Contact: incoherentblog@gmail.comView my complete profile